It’s worth recalling that mass literacy is only about 300 years old, so the modern culture of private reading is only slightly older than the United States, which is probably itself a consequence of mass literacy - sparked by Luther, Gutenberg, etc. Ironically, today the USA is also probably leading the decline in mass literacy woth a “post-literate president.” Maybe book-reading will eventually become an anachronistic hobby, although even Thomas Jefferson made this dire prophecy too about fiction [1].
“Acoustic representations activated in silent reading are best characterized as inner speech rather than as abstract phonological codes.” [2]
What they're getting at is that people aren't able to sit down and digest a moderately challenging book. This is due to attention span, the habit of 'scrolling' vs turning a page, etc... Those people can still 'read' and are literate in a sense.
I would say most of us have this situation already but it's much worse when you look more broadly around. People without an interest in books used to read tabloids which for all their faults were still more edifying then what the TikTok or YouTube shorts algorithms are presenting.
US is still near the top globally, though, and other countries like Germany had a bigger drop in reading performance that started earlier, so your point still stands.
I would be very curious to see stats on what percent of American adults will answer a poll claiming in the affirmative to have read any type of novel cover to cover in the past year.
The methods of the PISA study are quite controversial. It doesnt even properly control for immigration and background and the fact how its presented to pupils.
In Germany in the schools I know of, its stressed a lot how it does NOT affect anything at all, so its not actually a test on ability, but also on ability to motivate oneself to perform well in a meaningless test.
There's different levels to literacy, there was quite sobering research published recently about English college students who couldn't parse the opening paragraphs of Bleak House, even with assistance[1].
It's not been limited to the US but in the developed world broadly cognitive performance has been crashing for about a decade, i.e. the 'learning recession'. Talk to anyone who teaches these days and you usually get a fairly depressing story about kids being unable to decode basic information
I'm sorry, are you reading more because LLMs are doing your job in the meantime or are you reading more because you're mostly reading LLM output day to day now?
“I returned in haste to the place where Alipius was sitting, for I had left the book of the Apostle there when I stood up. I seized it, opened it, and read in silence the chapter upon which my eyes first fell”
Using the SourceLibrary MCP in Claude, I also found an example going all the way back to Euripides. In this scene, Theseus reads a tablet and the chorus has to ask what it says (because he read it, but not out loud).
Reading was very different in the old times, todays text is clear and filled with many aides that didnt exist back then.
For starters text didnt include spaces which im going to guess would have meant people tried to "sound" out sequences of letters and slowly found words and consumed the text. From what ive seen many times it was difficult to tell letters apart due to ink runs or simply because the ink was too think. Just imagine if its hard for us to tell capital eye and little el, it must have been impossible manytimes back then.
There were aslo no rules for spelling in the past, so you would have to sound out words much more (out loud or in your mind) to connect them to their meaning.
I see the comment is getting downvoted and I’d like to know why. AFAIK many languages had really very vague spelling rules and often several being used at once.
I have no idea, but with ADHD and all, I have taken recently the habit of reading aloud, especially course texts, doc’s and other boring stuff I easily get distracted with. I pretend to be a BBC 4 broadcaster. It seems to work. After awhile you can stop and just read silently.
Yep, if I am interested or even obsessed by the text. I have read literature classics voraciously and have read books in one go in the past. I probably read some 50 books for my Masters. But unfortunately some documentation of a template language I need for a project, but am otherwise less interested in, fails to adequately fascinate me. Reading aloud helps me to concentrate on the boring text and actually read it, not skim without really understanding.
Point is, it is just one reading tool in the bag and it is foolish to think it has something to do with reading level or comprehension. Might be helpful for many people whose focus has been nuked by platform apps.
My six-year-old is probably a bit ADHD, and with parents like his it's not surprising, but he will sit and read for *hours*, and stuff that's way beyond what you'd expect of a six-year-old. It's about the only time he's really quiet, and I mean the good kind of quiet, not the "sudden transient to quiet" that means you must drop everything and RUN to find out what they're doing *now*.
There's been a lot of debate over the years about what exactly it was that Ambrose was doing differently, and whether silent reading was really so uncommon in antiquity.
Reckon you could give us some idea of the other side? What are the alternative explanations proposed? The passage here (albeit translated) seems pretty unequivocal.
It also doesn't seem that unlikely. I know a fair few adults who mutter to themselves under their breath while reading, never having managed to kick the habit of reading aloud.
The argument for the Ambrose case is that the surprise isn't him reading silently, it's him reading silently while he has guests. (and elsewhere in the text Augustine mentions himself reading silently by himself in a way that suggests it's entirely normal)
the Augustine passage is a fascinating piece of evidence, but i wonder how much we can infer from it about the wider reading habits of the ancient world.
To get to that, we have to first think about the literacy rate in antiquity, which is estimated at 5 to 10%. And of those, most could probably read well enough to get by, but didn't routinely read longer texts. So someone who was well-enough versed in reading to not have to read the text out loud in order to understand it was probably a rare and noteworthy creature indeed...
And you can't read long texts if there aren't that many to begin with. But it raises a question - why didn't China, which invented printing press earlier, didn't fare better?
I would imagine most reading would be "let me read that sign" and not much else. To most folks, writing was probably logographs - "Ah, I've seen that collection of letters before, that meant 'pub' "
My dad told me this (“people used to always read aloud”) as a kid and I didn’t believe him, I thought he was making some kind of joke. It feels like the same kind of discovery as “some people don’t see pictures in their head”.
That example is prayer not reading, but yes there’s many Hebrew examples of meditating in the heart because most texts were memorised aurally rather than read directly.
A first century explicit example of private reading aloud is Acts 8:28–30 Philip runs up and "heard him reading" (ἤκουσεν αὐτοῦ ἀναγινώσκοντος).
Ten minutes of Claude searching the Hebrew and Greek scriptural texts came up with no examples that are explicitly private silent reading of text.
In this case it was a bespoke extemporaneous prayer, not something memorized but your point still stands. This is not an example of reading but it is used for the basis of the institution of the silent Amidah prayer according to the Talmud, even then of course it would have been memorized but today it is read from a prayer book.
It’s worth recalling that mass literacy is only about 300 years old, so the modern culture of private reading is only slightly older than the United States, which is probably itself a consequence of mass literacy - sparked by Luther, Gutenberg, etc. Ironically, today the USA is also probably leading the decline in mass literacy woth a “post-literate president.” Maybe book-reading will eventually become an anachronistic hobby, although even Thomas Jefferson made this dire prophecy too about fiction [1].
“Acoustic representations activated in silent reading are best characterized as inner speech rather than as abstract phonological codes.” [2]
1. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/08/reading-crisis-...
2. https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/BF03205520
Seems hard to square your claim that “today the USA is also probably leading the decline in mass literacy” with the PISA [1] research.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programme_for_International_St...
What they're getting at is that people aren't able to sit down and digest a moderately challenging book. This is due to attention span, the habit of 'scrolling' vs turning a page, etc... Those people can still 'read' and are literate in a sense.
I would say most of us have this situation already but it's much worse when you look more broadly around. People without an interest in books used to read tabloids which for all their faults were still more edifying then what the TikTok or YouTube shorts algorithms are presenting.
2 replies →
Nitpick: This is old data; US performance in reading dropped to basically the lowest levels ever during the latest test:
https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/pisa-2025-results-volum...
US is still near the top globally, though, and other countries like Germany had a bigger drop in reading performance that started earlier, so your point still stands.
I would be very curious to see stats on what percent of American adults will answer a poll claiming in the affirmative to have read any type of novel cover to cover in the past year.
The methods of the PISA study are quite controversial. It doesnt even properly control for immigration and background and the fact how its presented to pupils.
In Germany in the schools I know of, its stressed a lot how it does NOT affect anything at all, so its not actually a test on ability, but also on ability to motivate oneself to perform well in a meaningless test.
There's different levels to literacy, there was quite sobering research published recently about English college students who couldn't parse the opening paragraphs of Bleak House, even with assistance[1].
It's not been limited to the US but in the developed world broadly cognitive performance has been crashing for about a decade, i.e. the 'learning recession'. Talk to anyone who teaches these days and you usually get a fairly depressing story about kids being unable to decode basic information
[1]https://www.adorableandharmless.com/p/college-english-majors...
13 replies →
Not sure. Since LLM's have their spot, I, personally, have been reading much more. And I was no slouch when it came to consuming written materials.
Sure, some of it is slop, some of it is pretty good. But I did read more.
I'm sorry, are you reading more because LLMs are doing your job in the meantime or are you reading more because you're mostly reading LLM output day to day now?
Augustine describes silent reading himself:
“I returned in haste to the place where Alipius was sitting, for I had left the book of the Apostle there when I stood up. I seized it, opened it, and read in silence the chapter upon which my eyes first fell”
https://sourcelibrary.org/book/meditationes-divi-augustini-e...
Using the SourceLibrary MCP in Claude, I also found an example going all the way back to Euripides. In this scene, Theseus reads a tablet and the chorus has to ask what it says (because he read it, but not out loud).
https://sourcelibrary.org/book/euripides-i-ion-hippolytus-me...
Reading was very different in the old times, todays text is clear and filled with many aides that didnt exist back then.
For starters text didnt include spaces which im going to guess would have meant people tried to "sound" out sequences of letters and slowly found words and consumed the text. From what ive seen many times it was difficult to tell letters apart due to ink runs or simply because the ink was too think. Just imagine if its hard for us to tell capital eye and little el, it must have been impossible manytimes back then.
That's "aids", not "aides". Politicians have aides.
There were aslo no rules for spelling in the past, so you would have to sound out words much more (out loud or in your mind) to connect them to their meaning.
I see the comment is getting downvoted and I’d like to know why. AFAIK many languages had really very vague spelling rules and often several being used at once.
2 replies →
I have no idea, but with ADHD and all, I have taken recently the habit of reading aloud, especially course texts, doc’s and other boring stuff I easily get distracted with. I pretend to be a BBC 4 broadcaster. It seems to work. After awhile you can stop and just read silently.
fellow ADHD. if you read in a place with no distractions, you can read silently, and fast for a long time.
Yep, if I am interested or even obsessed by the text. I have read literature classics voraciously and have read books in one go in the past. I probably read some 50 books for my Masters. But unfortunately some documentation of a template language I need for a project, but am otherwise less interested in, fails to adequately fascinate me. Reading aloud helps me to concentrate on the boring text and actually read it, not skim without really understanding.
Point is, it is just one reading tool in the bag and it is foolish to think it has something to do with reading level or comprehension. Might be helpful for many people whose focus has been nuked by platform apps.
1 reply →
My six-year-old is probably a bit ADHD, and with parents like his it's not surprising, but he will sit and read for *hours*, and stuff that's way beyond what you'd expect of a six-year-old. It's about the only time he's really quiet, and I mean the good kind of quiet, not the "sudden transient to quiet" that means you must drop everything and RUN to find out what they're doing *now*.
And then come the questions. So many questions.
I never want that to stop.
2 replies →
There's been a lot of debate over the years about what exactly it was that Ambrose was doing differently, and whether silent reading was really so uncommon in antiquity.
Reckon you could give us some idea of the other side? What are the alternative explanations proposed? The passage here (albeit translated) seems pretty unequivocal.
It also doesn't seem that unlikely. I know a fair few adults who mutter to themselves under their breath while reading, never having managed to kick the habit of reading aloud.
For the other side there's A. K. Gavrilov's "Techniques of reading in classical antiquity", not (legally) freely available but quoted in various places such as https://kiwihellenist.blogspot.com/2016/02/reading-silently-...
The argument for the Ambrose case is that the surprise isn't him reading silently, it's him reading silently while he has guests. (and elsewhere in the text Augustine mentions himself reading silently by himself in a way that suggests it's entirely normal)
Makes sense, with oral traditions being so strong back then. Debugging a codebase by vocalizing variables sounds wild.
Imagine how creepy a reader must seem to a ancient uneducated analphabet.
Guy looks down at artifact, eyes flicker, pages flipped- then looks up: "Now i know.."
the Augustine passage is a fascinating piece of evidence, but i wonder how much we can infer from it about the wider reading habits of the ancient world.
To get to that, we have to first think about the literacy rate in antiquity, which is estimated at 5 to 10%. And of those, most could probably read well enough to get by, but didn't routinely read longer texts. So someone who was well-enough versed in reading to not have to read the text out loud in order to understand it was probably a rare and noteworthy creature indeed...
And you can't read long texts if there aren't that many to begin with. But it raises a question - why didn't China, which invented printing press earlier, didn't fare better?
4 replies →
I would imagine most reading would be "let me read that sign" and not much else. To most folks, writing was probably logographs - "Ah, I've seen that collection of letters before, that meant 'pub' "
3 replies →
My dad told me this (“people used to always read aloud”) as a kid and I didn’t believe him, I thought he was making some kind of joke. It feels like the same kind of discovery as “some people don’t see pictures in their head”.
“Now Hannah was praying in her heart; only her lips moved, but her voice could not be heard.”
Samuel 1:13
The Hebrew says literally “speaking on her heart”
That example is prayer not reading, but yes there’s many Hebrew examples of meditating in the heart because most texts were memorised aurally rather than read directly.
A first century explicit example of private reading aloud is Acts 8:28–30 Philip runs up and "heard him reading" (ἤκουσεν αὐτοῦ ἀναγινώσκοντος).
Ten minutes of Claude searching the Hebrew and Greek scriptural texts came up with no examples that are explicitly private silent reading of text.
In this case it was a bespoke extemporaneous prayer, not something memorized but your point still stands. This is not an example of reading but it is used for the basis of the institution of the silent Amidah prayer according to the Talmud, even then of course it would have been memorized but today it is read from a prayer book.
"silent spell casting"
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